Hour of the Witch(94)

“And what does that mean? What shall I see?” Mary asked.

“Frothing from the mouth. Vomiting. Confusion.”

“Then death?”

“Yes. Then death,” said Constance, recorking the bottle. “Thou art verily prepared to use it?”

“I am,” said Mary.

“When?”

“I am not sure. But I will allow Boston to hear more of my journeys into the forest with Reverend Eliot, and how the Lord is manifest in my behavior. There can be no aspersions upon my character: that is especially clear to me after the death of the child inside my daughter-in-law.”

“Thou hast thought through thy plan well.”

“Tell me something, prithee?” asked Mary.

“Yes?”

“What would mask the taste most effectively? Beer?”

The woman thought about this and sipped her tea. “Yes. I think so.”

“Should I use the whole bottle?”

“Oh, take no chances,” she said. “Use the whole bottle. Use every last drop.”





I saw melancholy. I saw sadness.

    —The Testimony of Catherine Stileman, from the Records and Files of the Court of Assistants, Boston, Massachusetts, 1663, Volume I





Thirty



When she got home, immediately she climbed the stairs to her and Thomas’s chamber and went to the floorboard that bowed ever so slightly. She plucked the nail and pulled up the wood, and slipped the bottle of poison into the small, secret chamber. Then she pushed the floorboard flat and the nail back into its hole. No one would notice what she had done. No one. No one but she would know the bottle was there.



* * *





The next day, after Thomas had ridden to the mill on Sugar and Catherine had gone out back to muck the animals’ stall, Mary went to the pegs by the front door where they hung their cloaks. She thought she might visit the utterly detestable Goody Howland and share stories of her missionary visits to the Hawkes and her work with John Eliot. The woman might not wish to see her, but that was irrelevant: it was all about spreading her story. Goody Howland was a veritable town crier.

She dropped her cloak by accident, however, and when she bent over to pick it up off the floor, she noticed a mark on the wood. It was small, barely the size of a shilling. She fell to her knees to study it carefully. She couldn’t believe it was real, but it was. There on the bottom of the front-door frame, just above the wooden floorboard, someone had carved a circle with a five-sided star. The mark of the Devil. A welcome of sorts to Satan: a sign of conversion and allegiance, a signal that this was a safe house.

    She thought of the forks and the pestle that had been buried in the dooryard and wondered once more if there were more out there beneath the stone-solid earth. Was it possible that her husband was in league with the Devil and wanted her poisoned by this spell? It didn’t seem likely. He was evil, but his guile was limited to the reality that he would not strike her when there was a witness. Did that mean that it was Catherine, after all? Or was it someone else who wished her ill?

Or, far worse, was it an attempt by someone to have she herself, Mary Deerfield, hanged as a witch?

Quickly she stood and backed away so that Catherine would not know she had seen the mark if the girl returned that moment from the horse stall.

She resolved to go to the harbor and visit Henry Simmons instead of seeing Goody Howland. Things may not in fact be moving more quickly than she had expected, but he needed to know of this new wrinkle. Her friendship with John Eliot would buy her time, but it was impossible to know how much.



* * *





Henry pushed aside a stack of ledgers and sat on the edge of the broad desk in his uncle’s office. He motioned for Mary to sit in the chair behind it. After she had told him what she had discovered at the base of the door frame, he mulled it over and said, his tone even, “I do not believe thou art in any more danger from the Devil’s sign than thou were from His tines.”

“From forks,” she said. “And not from His forks. From my father’s forks.”

“My point is this: Dost thou feel poisoned? Hast thou felt sick?”

“Other than my hand where Thomas tried to impale me to the table? Not especially.”

“?’Tis my point.”

“But I would like to know who is possessed. See that corrupted and obscene person rightfully hanged.”

He shook his head. “No, that is not thee, Mary. Thou dost not actually want that.”

    “Perhaps not. But I would like to know. And if the point is not to sicken me, then I especially want to know the witch, since in that case, the plan is more heinous still. Because then it is an attempt to have me accused of witchcraft and sent to the gallows.”

He looked down at his boots. “We do not know that there is a connection between the forks and the mark that someone carved into the wood. They could be separate talismans.”

“Thou canst not believe that!” she told him, exasperated by his attempts to be reasonable. “Thou knowest as well as I that these machinations are linked!”

“Yes. I believe that. But do I know it with certainty? No. We have no proof.”

“Someone is conspiring against me, and if someone is carving the Devil’s sign into my house, we both know: my efforts with the Hawkes will not be sufficient to protect me.”